HOW I FELL FOR MY GORGEOUS TEEN LOVER
Gambling gangster lavished bookies girl with expensive gifts and trips
CRIMELORD John Gilligan has broken his silence about the teen lover 25 years his junior.
The cocky crook swept bookies cashier Carol Rooney off her feet when she was just 18 – and he was in his mid-40s.
Gilligan lavished her with expensive presents, cash and first-class travel around Europe when he was at the height of his reign as Ireland’s No1 gangster.
In a series of sensational tapes obtained by the Irish Mirror, the boastful thug reveals: “She was a very, very pretty girl, a really beautiful girl. She had a personality second to none.
“And good looking, very good looking. Body second to none.
“I don’t know how many years I was older than her – it must have been 25 or 26.”
JOHN Gilligan has described his former teenage lover 25 years his junior as “having a great body“.
The middle-aged crook started dating Carol Rooney when she was an 18-year-old bookies cashier in Palmerston, West Dublin, where he placed huge bets.
It was the mid-1990s and Gilligan was at the height of his reign as Ireland’s No1 gangster.
He was making so much money he was paying gang members’ families to hide it in boxes.
Gardai believe that in a two-year period from 1994 to 1996, his henchmen imported £200million worth of cannabis from Europe to Ireland.
The tiny thug believed he was untouchable – and thought women were attracted to him.
Gilligan lavished Carol with expensive presents, cash and first-class travel around Europe.
He set his eyes on the teenager who was barely out of school – he was in his 40s.
He said: “I asked Carol Rooney to go for a meal. I was enjoying her company.
BEAUTIFUL
“She was a very pretty girl. It wasn’t boyfriend-girlfriend. I said, ‘This is not a relationship’.
“She was a very, very pretty girl, a really beautiful girl. She had a personality second to none.
“And good looking, very good looking. Body second to none. Gorgeouslooking woman.
“I don’t know how many years I was older than her – it must have been 25 or 26. I think I was 42 when I got locked up and she was 20. [In fact she was only 19 when he was arrested].
“If she went out with someone else, it didn’t bother me for half a second.”
Gilligan said having a teenage lover did not cause him problems with wife Geraldine.
He added: “No, we were legally separated since 1995. But I wasn’t going to rub her nose in it.
“When I came out of prison in 1994, she was giving out to me, not to do this, not to do that and it done my head in eventually.
“Geraldine wanted me to be holier than the Pope.”
But Carol’s family were worried when they heard stories she may have been seeing Public Enemy No1.
Gilligan said: “Her mother says to her, ‘Are you going out with John Gilligan? He’s gambling every day in the shop.’ “Because someone had said it. What happened was Carol Rooney had a friend, a girlfriend, and she was after telling her friend she was going out with me. “That we were going for meals. Carol and her friend had a little falling out and her friend was giving out about Carol to her mother. “The friend told her own mother, ‘She’s going out with John Gilligan’. So the mother of the friend told Mrs Rooney, ‘You’d want to check out your daughter’s boyfriend. It’s John Gilligan’.
“Then the mother asked Carol, ‘Are you going out with John Gilligan?’ and she said, ‘No mam, no, no. It’s actually a friend of his that I’m going out with. I do be in his company for a half an hour’.
“We’d all go to the Silver Granite pub for coffee and there’d be 10 of us, all the gamblers, so she wouldn’t be sitting in my company. The mother was not convinced and told your woman, ‘Don’t be saying that about my daughter going out with John Gilligan.”
Gilligan added Carol’s mother wondered who her boyfriend was and why she never brought him home.
He said: “I asked Brian Meehan [Veronica Guerin’s killer] would he get a mate of his to get a photograph with her [to fool Mrs Rooney].
“He picked Speedy Fegan. I couldn’t believe it but I didn’t know.
“They got the photograph, gives it to Carol’s mother in a frame and it’s on the mantlepiece.” Brendan “Speedy” Fagan, at the age of 26 was the North’s biggest drug dealer.
From Newry, Co Down, he was the Gilligan’s gang linkman across the border, earning him €11,600 a week.
But the ruse to deceive Mrs Rooney was about to come crashing down when Speedy ran out of road – and was shot 15 times in May 1999.
Gilligan added: “And then about a year later, two years later, I don’t know when it was, he was murdered.
“Next thing he [Fegan] is all over the news headlines that he’s after being shot as a drug dealer in Northern Ireland. I was speaking to Meehan about it.
“‘What the f***ing hell was that
Carol was a very pretty girl. Body second to none. I was 25 or 26 years older than her
JOHN GILLIGAN ON RELATIONSHIP WITH CAROL ROONEY
f***ing fella you got working for you?’
“Meehan said, ‘I know him, he’s a mate’. I said, ‘How could you f***ing do that. He would have been well known’.
“The bubble would have burst for him. This was supposed to have been kept sweet and low profile.
“I said, ‘What the f***ing hell are you doing?’ As it was he [Meehan] wasn’t the brightest.
“So that’s where that came out. The mother believed it till she seen it all over the papers. I was in jail at the time when it happened.”
Carol, who unwittingly found her- self caught up in Gilligan’s dark world, was in a hotel room in Amsterdam with the drug lord on the day Veronica was murdered on June 26, 1996.
The pair had travelled separately to Holland the day before.
Senior gardai who hunted Gilligan down say if she had given evidence against him, he would have been put for away for life for Veronica’s murder. But she was too terrified.
She had been Gilligan’s lover for a year when the murder took place and would have been a crucial part of the prosecution case.
She told gardai how Gilligan laughed and joked on the phone with Veronica’s killers Brian Meehan and Patrick “Dutchy” Holland half an hour after the brutal killing.
Carol recalled Gilligan said: “Ah well, that’s that. She wasn’t going to get away with it.
“I wonder what criminals she will be writing about now she is in heaven.”
Gilligan phoned the killers and said: “I hear you put a smile on her face.” In her statement to gardai, Carol told how Gilligan had become obsessed with Veronica and revealed how her murder was openly discussed by the gang.
Gilligan told her: “After tomorrow, all my problems will be over.” He also threatened Carol the same fate would befall her and her family if she ever opened her mouth.
In August 1996 she agreed to go to Australia to stay with a relation at Gilligan’s behest until the heat died down. The night before she left Carol met Gilligan and Dutchy Holland in London where the gang boss gave her £8,000 and warned her what would happen if she ever talked.
Holland then took her aside and told her: “Get yourself a new boyfriend, forget about John and everything you’ve seen and heard and everyone will be all right.”
Carol would later tell gardai she took this as a threat.
She stayed in Australia until 2002 when she moved back to the UK. She later married in Britain.
I wonder what criminals she will write about in heaven
JOHN GILLIGAN AFTER VERONICA MURDER
JOHN Gilligan and his gang carried out so many robberies firms nationwide had to change the day they paid their staff.
It was moved from the traditional Friday to a Thursday in a bid to thwart an epidemic of payroll heists.
In a series of sensational taped interviews, Gilligan revealed: “It became known as Black Friday because of all the robberies.
“All the wages would get robbed. Then they changed the day to Thursday because there were dozens of armed robberies getting done.
“At one stage you’d have to ask somebody else, ‘Are you going to do a robbery there cause we’re doing that.’ Because there were cases where a place had been robbed in the morning and fellas ran in and robbed it in the afternoon. That’s on record.
“You had to kind of agree with your gang, different gangs, and ask them, ‘Are you doing anything in that area?’
“Fellas would be getting chased from a bank by the guards and other fellas would be going down to do another bank.
“The police would come up this way and they’d be getting chased and they’d be going down the other way. That’s on record. It was a regular occurrence.
“In them days if there were two banks in close proximity to each other you’d come out of one and you’d run over and you’d rob another one. It happened many’s a time.
“The AIB is there and the Bank of Ireland is there – it happened in towns in the country.
“Both banks would get robbed. That’s what crews were doing in them days.”
Such was the crimewave in the mid-70s there was a massive backlog in the courts before cases got to trial – in some cases several years.
Gilligan claimed barristers were unofficially told if their clients pleaded guilty they would most likely get a suspended sentence to alleviate the problem.
But it didn’t work for him in 1977 when he was caught for stealing a consignment of cigarette lighters and received 18 months. Expecting to get off with a suspended term, he made the mistake of pleading guilty in front of a tough judge and got jailed.
Gilligan never had any respect for gardai or any authority and on one occasion the arrogant crook boasted about stealing back his wife Geraldine’s Fiat 127 which had been impounded.
It was in a yard at the back of Ballyfermot Garda station in West Dublin.
He said: “They took Geraldine’s car and wouldn’t give it back.
“They were after taking the battery out and the distributor cap because they had feeling I’d come in and rob it back.
“A friend of mine drove a Volkswagen van in and I jumped out, jumped into the car and we towed it out and drove it out, back from the station.”
It wasn’t Gilligan’s first time trying to steal a vehicle back from a Garda station.
In the late-70s he was given a 12-month sentence and 15-year ban for attempting to steal his own van back from a Garda compound.
Gilligan also had a habit of breaking the locks of warehouses around Dublin and then robbing them when security was lax.
He added: “Then we’d close the door again and put the lock back on.”
On one occasion he made off with a ton of sweets but was caught during the getaway.
He said: “I actually had my lock on their factory because they wouldn’t use that door – I knew the door
they’d use. I could open and close it meself. I always had a matchstick in it to see if it was ever opened or was the lock changed.
“I drove in, loaded with two others. When we were loading – we were going to do a few trips because we had a few buyers in different shops.
“We were on the way to sell it to a shop. The police car, a detective car, came alongside me.
“Because the van was left hand drive I was looking down. I said to the two lads with me, ‘The detective is here beside us. I think they know me.’
“Next thing a garda jumped out and he said, ‘What’s your name?’
“I pulled in and said I had a few sweets in the back for the kids.
“The garda looked in and said, ‘How many f***ing kids have ya?’ He took me to the Garda station and I noticed the van was still in the yard.
“They took us out of Crumlin police station about four or 5am to bring us to the Bridewell Court. I looked at the van and saw it was still down on its legs – they were aftertaking the keys of the van. It was still loaded.
“Three of us went to court and were charged in front of the judge and got bail.
“When we left the court I said, ‘The ‘f***in van is still loaded, if we get rid of that they’ll have no evidence.’
“So I’m going over on the bus. I walks into the yard and I seen a fella cleaning the windows and I had to pull the wires out. When I done the wires the van hopped and the window cleaner looked at me – and I just went, ‘Shush’.
“As I was backing the van out the cleaner knocked on the window to the police and they all surrounded me and said, ‘What are you doing?’
“I said I was getting me stuff out of the van. They said, ‘You’re f***ing
trying to rob it’. I said it was mine. So they arrested me again and brought me back straight away in front of the same judge who said, ‘Can he be charged with the same offence twice for the one thing?’
“Anyway, he put €200 bail on me and I got out.”
John Gilligan carried out a series of interviews upon his release from prison, hoping for a lucrative book deal – which never materialised. An Irish Mirror team travelled to Europe and obtained the sensational tapes and video. At no stage did the Irish Mirror have any dealings or contact with Gilligan or his associates, nor has he received any payment of any kind from us.
A place had been robbed in the morning and fellas ran in and robbed it in the afternoon
JOHN GILLIGAN ON EXTENT OF THE CRIMEWAVE IN THE MID-1970S